Make Kin Not Babies: Toward Feminist STS Pro-Kin nd Non-Natalist Politics of Population and Environment

Session Submission Type: Panel Discussion

Abstract

Feminist STS scholarship has long and richly addressed biogenetic reproduction, focusing on race, region, sexuality, class, gender, and more. However, feminist STS has also largely been silent about reducing the human burden on earth while strengthening ecojustice for people and other critters as means and not ends. Can we develop anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, STS-informed feminist politics of peopling the earth in current times, when babies should be rare yet precious and real pro-family and community politics for young and old remain rare yet urgently needed? How can we develop collaborative politics recognizing that peoples subjected to (ongoing) genocides may need more children? How can we intervene in the relentless glut of attention devoted to problematic, costly "rights" and "needs" for (mainly richer) women to have babies as an individual "choice"?

Questions: How to nurture durable multi-generational non-biological kin-making, while humans everywhere transition to vastly less reproduction? What alternative ways of flourishing can be nurtured across generations and across cultures, religions, nations? How to deter on-going anti-feminist population control efforts while generating innovative discourses that legitimate non-natalist policies and choices? How to promote research on forms of contraception women and men want (and can use under diverse circumstances) and reproductive services that actually serve? How to build non-natalist kin-making technologies and sciences in housing, travel, urban design, food growing, environmental rehabilitation, etc.?

Where are the feminist utopian, collaborative, risky imaginings and actions for earthlings in a mortal, damaged, human-heavy world? Why hasn’t feminist STS taken the lead in such fundamental endeavors?

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting – Denver

Individual Presentations

• Why Non-Natalisms Now? On Feminisms, Populations and Environmental Crises - Adele E. Clarke, University of California, San Francisco

• Children of Compost: Making Kin - Donna Haraway, UCSC

• Thinking Against Population and with Distributed Futures - Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

• Black Lives Matter - Alondra Nelson, Columbia University

• Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sexualities - Kim TallBear, University of Texas at Austin

• East Asian Low Fertility Crisis and Its Feminist Stories of Bio-power - Chia-Ling Wu, National Taiwan University